Unknown - 22_Cat_In_An_Ultramarine_Scheme

“Tony Valentine, my agent, will be rarin’ to go on this. And we can do the wedding in Chicago, because we’ll need a house here. Not too suburban. You don’t want a long commute.”

“Chicago? Living there?”

“Yeah. Of course.”

“Wouldn’t Vegas be a great talk-show city, lots of celebrities buzzing through?”

“This wouldn’t be the usual celebrity gab-and-promo fest. I’d do something similar to the radio counseling, only on a TV screen during the daylight hours.”

“The Circle Ritz …”

“We can keep my unit. Visit.”

“My job. The Crystal Phoenix.”

“Chicago has big hotels too. I’m sure your PR ideas will knock ’em dead around here too.”

“Literally?”

His laughter made the phone vibrate in her palm.

“I’m sure you could find a murder or two to solve here.”

“The Chicago winters …”

“We both grew up in winters like that. Look,” he said, “this has to be a joint decision. But it’s such an amazing opportunity. The show would be structured to do people some real good.”

“Elvis will miss you.”

“That’s another thing. No more eerie callins.”

“And … Midnight Louie.”

“He can move.”

“He couldn’t own the town, like here.”

“Maybe he’d have to hold down your condo, and we’d visit. Anyway, I’ll be home in a few days and we can discuss it. I have to stay on for more talks. I admit I was bowled over by their presentation. A whole conference room, huge TV screen, network VPs. Then there’s the latest mind-blowing wrinkle in my family. We’ll talk when I’m not semi–out of my mind from pressure on all sides.”

“Ooh. Sounds like a trip full of surprises.”

Temple clung to the phone, trying to calculate all the pros and cons of leaving Las Vegas.

“Too much to discuss on a phone call,” Matt said again. “I just couldn’t wait to tell you. We’ll find what works best for both of us. Love you.”

“Matt, I am so happy for you. I love you too.”

The line went dead, and Temple felt something pressing against her calves. Talk about pressure from all sides.

She looked down.

Midnight Louie looked up with solemn green eyes.

“That was Matt,” she told him. “How’d you like to be the biggest, baddest get-around-town dude in Chicago?”

She was not to know what Louie thought of that. The phone rang again. She wondered what Matt had forgotten to mention.

The voice wasn’t Matt’s. It was strange and fuzzy, as if coming from a bar or a street corner or a distant star.

“Can you hear me?” it asked. “The line is fading in and out.”

“Barely,” she answered, wondering if she should just hang up on a crank caller.

“You’re supposed to know me,” the voice was continuing. “Sorry if I sound slurred. I’m calling from Northern Ireland, wouldn’t you know? Yes, I’ve been drinking. That’s what we Irish do at wakes, even private ones.”

She was about to end the call, except something in the distorted voice rang disturbingly true. It went on.

“Hang up anytime you’re feeling bored. I’ve got two recently broken legs that will ache in this blasted damp weather for the rest of my life if I stay in the damned country, and I’m a wanted man, anyway.

“I’ve got a case of amnesia, where all I’m remembering is a bit about the IRA, a dead woman named Rebecca, or a possibly live one named Kathleen, and a crew of crazy-ass has-been magicians who think they belong to a secret society called the Synth.

“The man who was my only family for half my life is dead, as good as assassinated, and I suppose I’m next on the list. I don’t know if there’s any point for anything but another three fingers of Black Bush whiskey, but I’ve been told by the only man I ever trusted you’re a pretty smart and gutsy girl, and the Las Vegas weather would be better for my legs and my lungs, if not my long-term ‘health,’ so I have a decision to make as to where I’ll live and die or if there’s any point to the years in between those states.

“I don’t know anyone now, here or anywhere, who knows anything about me but enemies.

“They tell me my name is Michael Aloysius Xavier Kinsella, and I know I need to get the hell somewhere else fast. I guess there’s only one question to ask or answer before I decide where.

“Is it possible …

“Do you … love me?”

Temple had slowly slid down from shock until she was sitting on the hard parquet floor, her back braced against the sofa front, her legs and feet disappearing into the thick long hair of her faux-goat-fur rug.

Midnight Louie was now sitting right beside her, his soft, warm, sturdy bulk bracing her side and shoulder on the left side, the heart side.

There was no time to dither. She heard a hard-breathing silence on the other side of the world, from the other end of the satellite high in the sky, up there with Ophiuchus looking down and almost shaking the stars out of the sky from laughing at muddled mortals and that nasty upraised third finger of fate that seems to direct all the traffic in the universe.

She had no options either. So she listened to her voice break the silence and say three little words.

Three little inevitable, critical, dangerous, life-altering little words. She sighed and spoke them.

“Come home, Max.”

Midnight Louie Decries Sex and Gore

Actually, I do not decry sex. I am actively trying to acquire it, but the pool of possibilities continues to shrink during a politically correct age. Also I am turning up too many female relatives lately. I actually have begun to miss the evil Hyacinth, the late Shangri-La’s Siamese magician’s assistant.

All of my assorted human associates have been distressingly dull and monogamous, until just lately, which is not setting a good example for my species.

Nor am I against Al Gore. I am all for saving the planet and its many glorious species, every one, including my sorely tried larger cousins, the Big Cats. And no one can say I have not done my personal part for overpopulation.

What I do object to is “all gore,” the profligate and gratuitous use of truncated human body parts to pander to the popular taste.

It is bad enough that eaten-away legs figure in this last case. A floating severed arm on semipublic display does not polish the badges of the German or British police forces, even if it is from the last century.

My species is not known for shirking blood and guts, since we are carnivores, something we try to downplay in our domestic lives. We are only carnivores because nature has honed us for thousands of years to eat on the run.

Clearly, we can be rehabilitated.

Humankind I am not so sure about. Certainly, recent turns of events abroad put Kitty the Cutter in a whole new light. I must also take the powers-that-be to task for putting our absent Las Vegasites through so much misery and danger. I expect the usual murder victim, deserving or not, but I do not expect to lose anyone really nice. This is fiction, after all! I do not want it to be “a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing”!

Wait a minute! Ignore that last, borrowed turn of phrase. Sometimes I get carried away. I tell a good part of this tale, and I am not implying I have an idiot bone in my body or hair in my coat.

Anyway, since Mr. Gandolph the Great was falsely thought murdered in one of my earlier books, during the Halloween haunted-house séance to bring Harry Houdini back from the dead, I am hoping for a second resurrection.

It may be too much to hope that my heedless collaborator is listening to my druthers. She is part and parcel of a savage breed.

Homo sapiens is notorious for playing with its kill, as witness the watery end of poor Boots or the vicious slaughter of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, an ironic piece of mob violence if ever there was one.